A Land Called War
by Backyard Bombadier
Summary: Peace is blooming all throughout the land, which means some out-of-work samurai, which means some pretty lawless and pist-off samurai. Meanwhile, things begin to stir in the capital's ruins, not all of them human. Maybe Katsu/Kirara and other pairings.


My first fic here, so by all means, please comment, compliment, and flame. I'm also pretty unfamiliar with the formatting of the fics here, so they'll probably be some wackiness in the readability department. Anyways, this is pretty much a follow up to Samurai 7, probably one of my favorite anime series so far. Sorry if this first chapter makes little sense, but it was pretty late when I was writing this and my ideas have trouble be organized. Anyway, here y'are.

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First there was nothing but a random stream of binary garbage, the remnants of its old computer brain. Then, for a minute, there was a moment of amazing clarity. Blankness. A random sequence of images passed through it's remade mind. A little girl flowed into bales of rice, which flowed back into a field of corpses and empty mechanical shells. Then they were all washed away, and it was greeted with a panoramic view of a wasteland. For a second, it remarked to itself that it had a complete view of the hellish world around him, not limited to a line of sight dictated by 'eyes', whatever they were. For another second, it struggled to wrap its mind around these 'eyes' before deciding that the word was just some gibberish that his mind had invented. But it pushed these meaningless thoughts away, and instead focused at the environment surrounding it.

It was a canyon, a deep gorge with near-vertical walls of stone. The sun was shining straight down, casting the entire chasm with a bright white light. The only thing blocking this divine light was a lattice of metal that was perched several hundred feet over the ground. It was hemispherical in shape, and it seemed to be the wreckage of something, with bits hanging off and fragment of the structure sometimes falling downwards. The more it studied its surroundings, the more wreckage it saw. A huge black shape was leaning against the rock wall, and every several minutes, two small lights would flicker in the shapes upper segment. A huge pillar of metal plunged upward several hundred years away from it, other girders still attached to it. Much of the metal was black and twisted, and the more the newly awakened being looked at it, the more it thought about 'war'. It didn't know where this word came from, but this 'war' seemed to embody the gray, slowly decaying, twisted, burned word that reached outward and upward. The being of thought continued staring at the war around him, and slowly, very slowly, the sun moved over the canyon, and a deep blue, then black, settled in over it's new world.

It had no idea how long it had spent in the canyon; it didn't keep track of the sun and the cycles of light and darkness that drove it. It just wandered through the ruins that seemed to fill the canyon. It found massive obelisks of metal and plastic, huge shards of thick glass embedded in the stone walls, and dozens of the huge black shapes with the glowing and flickering green lights. It eventually floated upwards and meandered through the lattice of metal, discovering the new world of decay and wreckage that was above him. Still, he did not go above this roof of metal girders, whether it was out of fear or some sort of awe. All it did was wander, looking at the lifeless world, lifeless, at least until the first expedition came down.

"It's those god-damned hicks from Kanna. They're cowards. Sure, they had their moment of glory with the capital, but since then they're all cowards. Sending us to scout…is this what we've stooped down to?"

The source of this voice was a man, tall, with short graying hair and an unshaven face. He wore a piece of bright blue fabric around his chest and a similar, slightly darker robe. These colors clashed strangely with the metal around him, though the man's gray hair and skin seemed to be some sort of amazingly efficient natural camouflage, blending in with the warped metal that surrounded him. A curious, long, thin cylinder was at his waist, an object that seemed immediately familiar to the being of thought, though everything else about the man stirred some sort of vile feeling in it. The man's companion was dressed in duller colors, though the style of dress was similar. His skin was darker and his hair longer and curly. He jumped from a small octagonal pillar of metal onto a small arc of half-melted plastics.

"Don't be so harsh, Tetsuo." The curly-haired man paused for a minute, navigating his way around one of the huge black shapes. He stopped again, staring at the shell of metal before muttering, "Fucking Nobuseri." He spoke again though, this time to his colleague Tetsuo. "You have to admit, we need the work, what with this golden age of peace." Sarcasm. Even it could see that. "And, you also have to admit that they have pretty women. What was her name? Komachi? Remember her?" He gave a suggestive wiggle of his eyebrows and leaped onto the head of the black metal structure he had addressed as Nobuseri.

Tetsuo grunted in agreement. "You have a point, she's a pretty one." The man glanced upward at the lattice roof and spoke again. "It's almost noon. Come on, we should finish the patrol, and then maybe you could see pretty Komachi again." They both laughed, and another feeling bubbled up from within the being floating above them. It was pure malice, a desire to turn these two men into the twisted metal that surrounded them. It had no idea why it felt this way, but their attitude of speaking, especially towards Komachi, whatever creature that may be, felt wrong.

It watched the two men continue their way through the long canyon. Then it began to move upward, slowly, it's mind struggling to come to an agreement. It moved so slowly that be the time it had reached the metal lattice that covered his world, it was already night. It stopped here and floated below it, taking in the view of the sky above and the wasteland below. It thought about the two men, and it thought about Komachi. Then it moved upwards, up past the lattices and into the cool, clean world of the sky and the mosses and plants that had began their steady growth on the canyon's walls.

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So yeah… Hope it doesn't suck. Please toss me some constructive criticism, but go easy on the rotten vegetables and large pieces of furniture. I know thst this isn't that great, but I'm just trying to improve my writing style here. Expect some updates faily soon.


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